In mid-career, Rembrandt shifted to a new model of Jesus based on a living, accurate-looking model, possibly the first time in the history of Christian Art this had been done. Lloyd DeWitt will outline the recent exhibition he organized at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which travelled to the Musée du Louvre and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Rembrandt’s break from tradition, which was based on miraculous images of great authority, likely began as a quest for an emotional, realistic face of Jesus for finished works of art such as the 1648 Supper at Emmaus (Louvre) in which it first appears. The series of small oil sketches that document the shift seems to have continued growing and taking on new significance for the artist, at a tumultuous period in his own life, but a time when he was dealing with those at the heart of an extraordinary interfaith dialogue in his city of Amsterdam.

Lloyd DeWitt is Curator of European Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and organizer of the exhibition Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.

IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958-2011March 3 – August 12, 2012

If you visit IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958 – 2011, on the 4th floor of the AGO, you’ll notice a series of small square green and grey squares sprinkled liberally throughout the exhibition. These stickers are QR codes – scannable objects that will take you to a website or other piece of online content. Eighteen custom-designed QR codes populate the exhibition in total, letting smartphone users watch, share and comment on videos, audio and behind-the-scenes content in the Wi-Fi enabled Gallery.

Around 45% of Canadian mobile users now have smartphones. This means that nearly half of you are coming to the Gallery with a huge amount of technology sitting in your pocket that you can use to learn more about the art you see on display. Scan a code and you will be able to learn more about the piece of art next to it. From archival photos to videos of IAIN BAXTER&’s eco art van, each code is an opportunity to get under the skin of this fascinating and prolific Canadian contemporary artist.

This blog post also contains a complete list of the codes found in the exhibition and the URLs so you can continue to explore and learn once you get home.

For scanning QR codes we recommend Qrafter for iPhone and Barcode Scanner for Android. For all other cellphones please visit your app store.

Some things you can see when you scan a QR code in IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958 – 2011

A video of N.E. Thing Co.’s inflated works (a cloud and a flower) in the group exhibition Sculpture ’67 outside Toronto City Hall in 1967. http://j.mp/zGoA09

A video of vacuum formed and bagged works in the exhibition “Gas, Plastic & Bagged Works” at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 1966. http://j.mp/x9VpHe

A video of Iain Baxter using food items to create sculptural art works in the exhibition Food for Thought at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff in 1987. http://j.mp/xipBQf

A video of Monopoly with Real Money performed in the Toronto-Dominion Bank branch at York University in 1973. http://j.mp/wSbJhT

A series of N.E. Thing Co. advertisements broadcasted over the radio in 1970. http://j.mp/Afw2M5

A photograph of Iain Baxter conducting field studies in the Raft River Range, Idaho in 1958. http://j.mp/ynvys7

A page from Iain Baxter’s notebook outlining how to make byobu screens. http://j.mp/xDej8K

Pages from a photo book Iain Baxter published in 1979 titled “Vancouver Beauty Spots.” http://j.mp/yWpB35

Join the Art Gallery of Ontario and FITC on Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 11 a.m. for an online discussion about the relationship between art and design.

What: #ArtHour is a Twitter chat with a new art topic each month. We invite you to spend one hour each month thinking about and sharing what art really means to you.When: Thursday, February 9, 11:00 – 12:00 EST and then every second Thursday of the month.Where: On Twitter – Follow @AGOToronto and @FITC for more information or search for the hashtag #ArtHour. We’ll also be posting the questions here on the blog.Who: #ArtHour is for everyone – Galleries and museums, arts professionals, artists and anyone interested in learning more and meeting other passionate art fans.Why: It’s a great, free way of meeting art fans from across the world.How: Starting at 11am we’ll be asking a series of questions around the month’s topic for you to answer, debate and discuss.

From 11am until 12.00pm EST on Thursday, February 9 the chat hosts will be tweeting a question every 10 minutes using the hastag #ArtHour. Anyone can respond, also using the #ArtHour hashtag. What is a hashtag?

For example, we would tweet:

Q1 What is your favourite art gallery? #ArtHour

And you could tweet back:

A1 The Art Gallery of Ontario! #ArtHour

Our January topic is THE BEST OF THE BEST. From your favourite galleries to the best experience you’ve had

We hope that you’ll help spread the word and join us for this great online event. For more information about #ArtHour please email holly_knowlman@ago.net.

Hosted by celebrated actress and self-confessed foodie Lisa Ray, the competition is judged by Head Judge, Chef and restaurateur, Mark McEwan, as well as Resident Judge and LA restaurateur, Shereen Arazm.

Yael Bartana is an Israeli-born artist and filmmaker now based in Amsterdam, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Her film trilogy “And Europe will be Stunned” made between 2007 and 2011, was shown at the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennial in 2011. The films revolve around the activities of a Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland invented by Bartana. As the artists says “This is a very universal story; as in previous works, I have treated Israel as a sort of a social laboratory, always looking at it from the outside”. In 2010 she won the Artes Mundi prize for work that stimulates thinking about the human condition.

Join Yael Bartana and Sławomir Sierakowski, the protagonist of “And Europe will be Stunned” for a conversation about Bartana’s work moderated by Chen Tamir, an independent curator and arts writer based in New York, Toronto, and Tel-Aviv. She is also the Program & Operations Manager at Artis.

This blog post is part of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario entitled IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958 – 2011. Visitors can scan QR codes in the exhibition space to see additional content relating to specific works in the show such as this image below:

While living in Paris in 1980, Baxter completed a series titled Paris Beauty Spots, applying the phrase “beauty spots”¬–generally used to describe birth marks on humans–to architectural landmarks in a city. He photographed the reflection of fourteen iconic sites using a round handheld mirror and a Polaroid SX-70 camera. Later that year Baxter worked with a large-format Polaroid 20 x 24 camera in Amsterdam, one of three in the world, which printed instant images measuring seventy-eight by sixty centimeters. He used the special camera to shoots details of a female model’s naked body, each time with a different Polaroid from the Paris Beauty Spots series placed beside a real beauty mark on her body. He titled this complementary work Reflected Paris Beauty Spots.

This blog post is part of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario entitled IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958 – 2011. Visitors can scan QR codes in the exhibition space to see additional content relating to specific works in the show such as this image below:

Baxter began bagging objects in plastic in 1966. At first, he used a heat sealer to form clear plastic bags around assorted objects such as rocks, goldfish and moldy sliced bread. He then progressed to using a hand-operated high frequency welding machine. He used an old machine at Arrow Tent and Awning Company after hours, which he later was able to purchase with funds from the Canada Council. With this tool, he constructed more advanced bagged works using clear plastic bags with landscape motifs made of coloured vinyl stitched to it. Concurrently, he constructed three-dimensional sculptures using welded vinyl filled with air.

IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958 – 2011 is open at the Art Gallery of Ontario from March 03 – August 12, 2012

This blog post is part of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario entitled IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958 – 2011. Visitors can scan QR codes in the exhibition space to see additional content relating to specific works in the show such as this image below:

In 1970 the N.E. Thing Co. participated in a series of professional conferences. It rented a booth in the Data Processing Managers Association International Conference and Business Exposition at the Seattle Trade Center, exhibiting alongside the likes of established technology companies AT&T, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, IBM and Xerox. The N.E. Thing Co. marketed its consultancy services at a booth populated with the artwork Go (in the shape of a stop sign) and a giant, inflated banner shaped like a computer punch card. It also dispensed branded manila folders, ingeniously sized to store other companies’ brochures.

IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958 – 2011 is open at the Art Gallery of Ontario from March 03 – August 12, 2012